[TFUI] RE: [XP] Should someone else be writing the GUI.

Amir Kolsky wrote:

> All I am saying is that you should not leave UI
> decisions to progammers, nor
> should you leave UI decisions to customers. Everyone
> should chip in with
> ideas and it's the role of the interaction designer
> to bring a coherent
> whole to the team. The team will approve the
> suggestions or disapprove the
> suggestions.

The team should also escalate the review of the UI.

> The customer may not like the
> interactions suggested. The
> engineer might estimate the implementation too be
> too costly. With a
> conceptual prototype you can go to users and ask
> them what they think.

Right - before or after committing to code.

> If
> they hate the way things are going you might like to
> stop and reconsider
> what you've done. But it's much easier to test a
> mock UI with 50% mocked
> functionality (which the users have no idea is
> mocked) at the beginning of
> the project than it is to test 50% real
> functionality at the beginning of
> the project (which is impossible, of course).

If I have an application with two GUIs, I call them
"skins". (That does not mean the rock-n-roll "skins"
on party applications; they are just one kind. I mean
the buttons come and go.)

GUIs should obey the guideline "for every delivery,
each button has a feature and each feature has a
button".

Writing a GUI with a bunch of buttons missing their
features breaks that guideline.

The fix is to skin the app. Provide a configuration
mode that makes useless buttons invisible.

Testing in the GUI layer makes skins very safe. But
without those tests, a programmer (even obeying Humble
Dialog Box) could break one skin when changing
another.

> Eventually, the people to make the final detailed
> decision about the UI are
> the users. They need to be presented with
> alternatives.

And alternatives should be easy.

> A UI design which is
> based on what the end user 'wanted' can usually be
> vastly improved on. It's
> just that the end user does not have the UI
> experience that a person who
> makes a living of designing UI's has.

Right - so escalate the review of all skins.

> What I said is that by decoupling the UI from the
> Service Layer you enable a
> larger set of user interfaces by ensuring that the
> domain actions are
> encapsulated within the domain using very clear
> interfaces. This brings
> about a superior design.

And a decoupling that those skins can exploit.


=====
Phlip
  http://industrialxp.org/community/bin/view/Main/TestFirstUserInterfaces


		
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